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The WHO eventually withdrew that proposal after taking withering fire from the food industry, but sugar’s reputation sunk lower still as researchers launched an even more worrisome line of inquiry, linking sugar to addictive substances. In 1993, at the University of Michigan, a scientist named Adam Drewnowski took a fresh approach in examining the problem of bingeing, or compulsive overeating. Drewnowski knew there were links between sugar and addiction to opiates; studies showed, for instance, that sweets sometimes eased the pain of withdrawal. So he treated his subjects as if they were drug addicts.
He gave them a drug that counters the effect of opiates; called naloxone, this drug is given to people who overdose. Drewnowski then offered his subjects a variety of snacks—ranging from popcorn, which was low in sugar, to chocolate chip cookies, which were loaded with sugar, as well as fat. His findings: The drug worked best in curbing the appeal of the snacks that were highest in both.

If anything, high-fructose corn syrup has a worse reputation among consumers, though the issue should not be whether eating too much of the syrup is worse for one’s health than table sugar—
experts now agree they
are equally bad. Rather, at a time consumers were trying to cut their sugar consumption, food companies doubled down on the syrup—it’s cheap and convenient for manufacturing—which drove the production of soda and snacks to record heights.

Despite all the scrutiny, however, pure fructose has largely gotten a free pass—until now. New research on fructose is raising concern. (Nutrition science, it needs to be stressed, is generally far less authoritative than studies that involve rigorous, months-long trials, such as those for pharmaceuticals, so these studies on fructose, like those on sugar, should be viewed with caution.) In 2011 an independent group of researchers at the University of California at Davis reported on their examinations of pure fructose and they made what could be a significant find: In a two-week trial, they sequestered young adults in a lab to track their eating more accurately and gave them a drink at each meal alternately sweetened by glucose, fructose, or corn syrup. The glucose group emerged largely unscathed, but those who got the fructose or corn syrup beverages experienced a 25 percent jump in their triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, and a fat-binding protein, all markers for heart disease.

Kraft, when I asked about this new research, said fructose is considered safe by regulatory officials, but that it would “continue to monitor the research and respond to any regulatory recommendations that result.” John White, a veteran sugar industry researcher who helped develop sweeteners including high-fructose corn syrup, said he, too, is waiting for more studies to be done before rendering a verdict on how
fructose might be affecting the American diet. “The testing has involved high concentrations of fructose, so I think it’s premature to point at fructose,” he told me. Still, where fructose was once hailed as the innocent nectar of fruits, it is now looming large as a health concern at least as great as table sugar.

When it comes to flying under the public’s radar, however, even fructose can’t match the spectacular PR that food companies have garnered for a sweetener known as “fruit juice concentrate.” Typically made from grapes and pears, with a huge global market, this concentrate is now being added to a staggering array of products, from fruit leather to pastries to
cereal to almost any sweet product that the manufacturer wants to link to the healthy image of fruit.

Juice concentrate is made through an industrial process that is highly variable, including any or all of the following steps: peeling the fruit, thereby removing much of the beneficial fiber and vitamins; extracting the juice from the pulp, which loses even more of the fiber; removing the bitter compounds; adjusting the sweetness through varietal blending; and evaporating the water out of the juice. At its extreme, the process results in what is known within the industry as “stripped juice,” which is basically pure sugar, almost entirely devoid of the fiber, flavors, aromas, and or any of the other attributes we associate with real fruit. In other words, the concentrate is reduced to just another form of sugar, with no nutritional benefit over table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. Rather, its value lies in the healthy image of fruit that it retains. “The advantage that the fruit juice concentrate people have from a marketing standpoint is this product appears on labels in a very healthy context,” White, the industry scientist, told me. A company like General Foods can use this stuff and still put the comforting words
contains real fruit
on the box.

General Foods was not the first to recognize the marketing potential of fruit concentrate in processed foods, but it used this supersugar to great effect in one of its biggest moneymakers: a “fruit drink” called Capri Sun, which Philip Morris acquired in 1991
for $155 million. Five years later, in what Geoffrey Bible praised as a
“staggering” achievement, the drink reached $230 million in annual sales, with a volume that was rising a spectacular 26 percent each year. A portion of this success was due to some technical heroics in the factory, where engineers figured out how to retool the manufacturing process to cycle more quickly through the drink’s twenty-one flavors, which greatly enhanced productivity and the bottom line. But there was more to it than that. Like Kool-Aid and Tang, Capri Sun was sweetened mainly by high-fructose corn syrup, but it also now contained juice concentrate, which allowed the drink’s label to boast, for the first time, “Natural fruit drink. No artificial ingredients.” This was a
huge selling point for moms who, as a result, felt more comfortable adding the drink to their kids’ school lunches and snacks.

I asked Capri Sun’s former brand manager, Paul Halladay, whether the drink’s formula could have been altered to avoid using the fruit concentrate without changing the taste.
“Yes, you could do that,” he told me. “It was not a major part of the sweetener. But Capri Sun has always had some fruit concentrate. It helps with the validity of the ‘natural’ in the advertising to have the natural in there.”

“Kraft has always taken pride in labeling its products clearly and accurately and in a manner that is not misleading to consumers,” a company spokeswoman told me. “The nutritional information resulting from the addition of real fruit juice and use of the natural claim was in keeping with the labeling regulations.” But Capri Sun’s use of “natural” in its marketing would come under fire in 2007, when a Florida grandmother named Linda Rex picked up a case for a young relative visiting from Ireland. “When I saw ‘All Natural’ on the label, that sounded healthier than soda,” she said. “But when I got home and got out my glasses, I threw it in the garbage, when I realized it contained high-fructose corn syrup and was nearly identical to soda.” Some of Capri Sun’s flavors, in fact, were higher in sugar than soda. Wild Cherry, for instance, had 28 grams of sugar—more than six teaspoons—in each 6.76-ounce pouch. Coke, in its larger 12-ounce can, has 39 grams—28 percent less per ounce. Working with an attorney for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Rex sued Kraft for deceptive marketing.
Eighteen days later, Kraft announced it would replace the words
all natural
with the phrase
no artificial colors, flavors, or preservatives
, and thanked the group for its work in resolving the matter. Kraft later set out to reduce the drink’s sugar load to 16 grams, the company said.

Whether Kraft lost any sales from these concessions, however, is not clear. It was projecting a 5 percent drop in 2008 due to a variety of factors, but a new advertising campaign—“Respect the Pouch”—aimed at making the drink cooler with six- to twelve-year-olds,
sent consumption soaring
again by more than 17 percent. But Capri Sun has been helped by another scheme, which was first deployed back in the 1990s, and this was an idea that the Philip Morris executives could claim as their own.

W
hen Philip Morris acquired General Foods and Kraft, its executives were faced with one overriding challenge: They knew almost nothing about processed foods. Moreover, the people who ran these two food giants disliked and distrusted one another. Their operating styles could not have been more different. General Foods, with its throngs of food scientists, was cerebral and painstaking in the way it rolled out products or adjusted its marketing to exploit consumer-driven trends like fiber or low-fat. One former Kraft executive who started out with General Foods described the latter as Ancient Greece, studied and cultured and not especially keen on warfare. By contrast, he viewed Kraft as the imperial Roman army on a brutal march to conquer the world. It boasted a powerful lineup of mega-brands and ever-changing fast food sensibilities. Its president, Michael Miles, was a former executive at Leo Burnett, the advertising agency, and chairman of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shortly after arriving at Kraft, he recruited a number of Ivy League MBAs and Procter & Gamble executives to add to Kraft’s skills. They did things like increase prices and advertising simultaneously to take the lead over competitors. Following the merger, Miles was made CEO of the combined food divisions, and he brought the top executives from both companies to Key West for three days of team building. By the end of 1990, however, the merger looked more like an acquisition by Kraft:
Only two of the thirty-five executives who remained had come from General Foods.

The Philip Morris executives, led by CEO Hamish Maxwell, had an easygoing management style that might have made them more partial to the reserved manners at General Foods, but they valued even more the revenue gains from Kraft. Their answer to merging these two “nation-companies” as smoothly as possible was to send Geoffrey Bible to the Kraft
headquarters near Chicago and have him show the way. His rallying cry was “synergy,” and Philip Morris
had some strategies of its own to offer on this front. In the coming months, the vast sums that Philip Morris spent advertising tobacco won discounted ad rates for the company’s Miller beer; products were jointly promoted, such as cigarettes and Post cereals in the Virginia Slims tennis tour; and the pacts that Marlboro had with 7-Eleven stores leveraged the sale of an extra $20 million a year in Oscar Mayer hot dogs. Philip Morris also made sure that the technicians and brand managers throughout its empire talked to one another to share the secrets of their marketing triumphs.

“The concept of ‘synergy’ derives from the powerful idea that two or more entities have greater strengths combined than they could ever claim apart,”
Bible told Kraft managers at a strategy meeting in late 1990. “That’s certainly true of the family of companies represented here today. If the tremendous creative resources of KGF
^*
, Miller and the Philip Morris companies can be brought together to interact on behalf of understanding the consumer—power can be released on the market unlike any of us could do on our own. That’s our mission for this conference, in a nutshell. To start a chain reaction of synergy throughout this corporation. A chain reaction whose ultimate goal is to better understand the men and women who buy our products.”

Nowhere did this message resonate more loudly than in the beverage division. By 1996, the company’s fruity drinks—created by General Foods but now marketed by Kraft—were dominating a large stretch of the beverage aisle. Not only had their annual sales moved to the cusp of the hallowed mark of $1 billion, Kool-Aid and the company’s other brands were now in solid third place behind the titans of soda, Coke and Pepsi.

The beverage managers at Kraft fully embraced the concept of synergy in responding to Bible’s call to better understand and target the consumer. In the summer of 1996,
they were back in front of the Corporate
Products Committee at Philip Morris, presenting a detailed account of their victories. The meeting minutes, in turn, reflect the celebratory air, with the tobacco executives doling out nothing but praise.

“The Beverage division, consisting of seven core trademarks, is approaching the one billion mark in both pound volume and revenue,” one of the Philip Morris executives who attended the meeting, Nancy Lund, wrote in the minutes. “1995 was a turning point, 1996 is on track for a record year.”

The details of this accomplishment were presented to the committee by James Craigie, a Harvard-trained MBA who had joined Kraft thirteen years earlier and risen to executive vice president and head of beverages, and they offer a window on more than just Kraft’s efforts to accelerate its sales. The beverage division’s work reflected the culmination of the food industry’s decades-long love affair with sugar and the cunning developed by processed food managers, whether gleaned from laboratory experiments or the war rooms of marketing experts. All of this skill and resourcefulness was channeled into a colossal, sustained push to remake and exploit one of the America’s biggest dietary habits: the nonalcoholic drink.

To achieve their gains, the Kraft beverage managers went into the suburbs, where the principal target was moms who had grown worried about the health implications of sugar. They rolled out products whose formulations were still guaranteed to generate bliss, but with fruit motifs that disguised the sugar as something more nourishing. One such new line for Kool-Aid, called Island Twists,
“received extremely high scores from Moms who found the real fruit flavors to be very wholesome,” the presentation to the products committee said. They handily beat, by more than two to one, the sales of Snapple, then owned by rival Quaker Oats.

Having reached the moms, the beverage division went after African Americans next, targeting their preferences. It used pinpoint-accurate studies of black consumers to nail down their likes and dislikes and then adjusted the company’s advertising accordingly. “Consumer research has
revealed that African Americans like to customize their Kool-Aid by adding
fruit or mixing flavors,” so the marketing division used this “consumer insight” to produce a more effective marketing theme: “How do you like your Kool-Aid?”

Kraft then went into supermarkets with new clever strategies to increase the power of their displays. Each April, in grocery stores throughout the country, the company’s sales force installed thirty-thousand stand-alone racks with five shelves each and a banner on top to display their drinks, towering over the aisle to draw the shopper’s attention. These usually stayed up only for the summer, when sales for sugary drinks peaked. But Kraft convinced the stores to keep these racks up—and extend America’s sugary drink habit—until winter by agreeing to share the shelf space on the racks with puddings and other desserts from their sister divisions.